A Look At Bernie TV

April 23, 2018 — Ron Chusid

While we don’t have Bernie Sanders in the White House, but we can see much more of him on line. New York Magazine has a feature on Bernie Sanders’s digital media empire. Here are some excerpts from a much longer article:

The Vermont senator, who’s been comparing corporate television programming to drugs and accusing it of creating a “nation of morons” since at least 1979 — and musing to friends about creating an alternative news outlet for at least as long — has spent the last year and a half building something close to a small network out of his office in the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill…

Sanders hosts an interview show (“The Bernie Sanders Show”) that he started streaming over Facebook Live on a semi-regular basis after his staff got the idea in February of 2017 to film the senator chatting with the activist Rev. Dr. William Barber. After they posted that simple clip and it earned hundreds of thousands of views with no promotion, they experimented with more seriously producing Sanders’s conversation days later with Bill Nye.

The chat with the Science Guy ended up with 4.5 million views. Sensing an opportunity, the next day Sanders’s aides turned down multiple network TV requests and took his response to Trump’s first address to Congress directly to his Facebook page.

Things escalated. Audio recordings of his conversations, repackaged as a podcast, have since occasionally reached near the top of iTunes’ list of popular programs. Sanders’s press staff — three aides, including Armand Aviram, a former producer at NowThis News, and three paid interns — published 550 original short, policy-focused videos on Facebook and Twitter in 2017 alone. And, this year, he has begun experimenting with streaming town-hall-style programs on Facebook. Each of those live events has outdrawn CNN on the night it aired.

“The idea that we can do a town meeting which would get a significantly larger viewing audience than CNN at that time is something I would not have dreamed of in a million years, a few years ago,” Sanders says…

Sanders’s splashiest offerings are the spare 30-minute interviews with figures like Nye, Al Gore, and Bill de Blasio conducted in a small Senate studio. But the bulk of his programming are the short, tightly produced, and highly shareable videos that cover everything from Trump administration greed and lessons to learn from Canada’s health-care scheme to explainers from his staff (“John Bolton Should Scare Everyone,” says his foreign policy adviser in one recent offering) and real people’s straight-to-camera testimonials about their experiences with health care or tax systems. Only around one-quarter of the videos feature Sanders himself, though each is branded with his name…

As with everything Sanders does in the Trump age, the question his allies and enemies are now considering is what it all means if he runs for president again. Sanders would be 79 on Inauguration Day 2021, but he’s held rallies across the country since his last run, and he’s convened his top advisers to discuss what such a campaign would look like.

His newfound ability to reach masses of voters directly doesn’t explicitly play into his electoral considerations, Weaver told me. But it looms large: The political team’s major project since that race has been to maximize Sanders’s ability to drive his movement forward directly, whether it’s through his videos or Our Revolution, the post-campaign political group it started.

Posted in Al Gore, Bernie Sanders, Blogs & Social Media, Donald Trump, News Media. Tags: , , , , , . No Comments »

Ed Schultz Says MSNBC Fired Him For Supporting Sanders And Suppressed Coverage Of Sanders

April 18, 2018 — Ron Chusid

During an interview last week, Ed Schultz said he was fired from MSNBC due to his support for Bernie Sanders. As should not come as a surprise to anybody, Schultz also said that MSNBC was “in the tank for Hillary Clinton.”

Schultz discussed how MSNBC tried to suppress coverage of Bernie Sanders. Schultz had planned to cover Sanders’ campaign launch on May 26, 2015 but was told five minutes before air time by MSNBC President Phil Griffen and told, “You’re not covering this.”

Schultz described Griffin as “a watchdog” and said that Griffin exercised considerable control over what he could report at MSNBC. Schultz had a far more favorable description of RT, where he currently anchors a show, saying that RT has not attempted to control what he says as MSNBC had. He said that MSNBC had suppressed coverage of Sanders until he was doing too well in the race to ignore.

Schultz further discussed how the Democratic nomination was rigged for Clinton, and how MSNBC assisted her:

“I think the Clintons were connected to [NBC News chief] Andy Lack, connected at the hip,” Schultz said. “I think that they didn’t want anybody in their primetime or anywhere in their lineup supporting Bernie Sanders. I think that they were in the tank for Hillary Clinton, and I think that it was managed, and 45 days later I was out at MSNBC.”

“I thought it stunk,” he added.

This pro-Clinton bias was not limited to NBC and MSNBC. Schultz also noted how Democratic National Committee member Donna Brazille, formerly at CNN, had leaked debate questions to Hillary Clinton.

Firing Ed Schultz was only part of MSNBC’s attack on the left, and failure to follow journalistic standards, out of their support for Clinton. Immediately after the election stories on MSNBC were blaming Jill Stein for Clinton’s loss. This was based upon the false argument that Stein’s voters would have voted for Clinton if Stein was not on the ballot. (Personally I would have voted for another anti-war candidate such as Gary Johnson as opposed to voting for a warmonger such as Clinton if Stein was not on the ballot–and there is evidence that Clinton’s pro-war views harmed her in the election). They also ignored the much larger number of former Obama voters who voted for Trump as opposed to Clinton in 2016.

MSNBC has subsequently been pushing Clinton’s unproven claims blaming Russia for her loss. FAIR.org (Fairness And Accuracy in Reporting) has criticized their reporting on Russia. MSNBC has also been caught misrepresenting testimony from the Department of Homeland Security to promote conspiracy theories that Russia was responsible for Trump beating Clinton.

A portion of the interview with Ed Schultz is in the video above and the full podcast is available here.

Posted in Bernie Sanders, Democrats, Gary Johnson, Hillary Clinton, Jill Stein, News Media, Politics. Tags: , , , , , , . No Comments »

Bernie Sanders Encourages Progressive Candidates At Training Conference

April 17, 2018 — Ron Chusid

Bernie Sanders was the keynote speaker last week at a four day conference for the training of progressive candidates. ABC News reported:

Sanders’ legacy political organization, Our Revolution, partnered with the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC) to host the conference and the organizers were excited by the number of signups. According to event representatives, 70 percent of the conference attendees were actively running in 2018 — 64 percent of them in districts President Donald Trump won in 2016. The group was noticeably diverse too: 55 percent women, 40 percent people of color and 82 percent who have never held political office…

Like Sanders’ team, the PCCC is known in Washington and political circles for talking openly about — and fundraising on — divisions in the Democratic Party between Progressives focused on economic populism and more centrists. Even in the era of Trump, when Democrats have largely unified in their opposition to this White House, a major theme of the conference was that Democratic candidates should not shy away from campaigning hard to the left, even if that means bucking advice from some Democratic Party officials.

“Any old blue just won’t do,” Nina Turner, the president of Sanders’ legacy political organization, Our Revolution, said introducing Sanders. “I am talking about ‘Bernie blue.’”

Several of the attendees lamented that Democratic Party officials had, they thought, handpicked more mainstream candidates around the country or advised folks to temper progressive platforms. At one point, PCCC co-founder Adam Green asked the crowd if any of them had been encouraged to run more to the center and half the hands in the room seemed to go up.

Mark Gruenberg had more on Sanders’s speech for Mint Press News:

Sanders was greeted with a roar, repeated chants of “Bernie! Bernie! Bernie!” and interrupted frequently by applause and cheers—and occasional laughter for his jibes at the GOP, centrist Democrats, and political consultants. He also stated money is useful and needed, but that it’s no substitute for shoe leather.

“Watch out for consultants,” he warned. “There’s a large group of people, particularly here in Washington, who make zillions of dollars and often their advice is conservative, and wrong. Trust your heart.

When I was first elected as mayor of Burlington [Vermont], I defeated a five-term mayor because I literally knocked on thousands and thousands of doors. The most important thing is face-to-face contact,” he said.

“Do not spend your entire lives raising money, as some here would have you do.”

Sanders, even more than the other speakers, pointed out that on issues, the country is increasingly with the progressives, including the issues he raised in his 2016 Democratic presidential primary campaign. Those ideas, such as Medicare for All, $1 trillion in infrastructure spending, free tuition at public colleges and universities, and the wipeout of college debt, were considered radical then.

Many in the Democratic Party, he claimed, waved them aside, or worse. But now, for example, his Medicare for All bill has 16 Senate Democratic co-sponsors and the $15 minimum wage—the Dems at the time were stuck on $10.10—now has 30 U.S. House sponsors. And he said the latest opinion poll shows 59 percent support for Medicare for All.

By contrast, a wide range of attendees reported consultants advising them not to run on progressive planks, not to campaign for the minimum wage increase or Medicare for All or gun control measures and—in some cases—not to even put a (D) on their signs. The attendees rejected that advice.

But it’s not just the GOP standing in the way of the progressives. In some cases, it’s the Democratic establishment. Just as in the close Lipinski-Newman congressional primary on Chicago’s Southwest Side and suburbs, Nevada 4th District hopeful Amy Vilela is taking on the state’s Democratic machine constructed by retired U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid…

“The establishment wants, #1, to push tax cuts for millionaires and a war agenda. And #2 is to tell you ‘politics are too complicated for you, so don’t get involved.’” And Republicans’ “idea of a good election is nobody votes and big money dominates.”

“But if you look at what my colleagues are doing, you realize anybody can run for anything. Just look at the president of the United States and know that you know more than he does on his best day,” the senator drolly said, to laughter from the crowd.

That prompted him to set a goal for the group: A vast increase in turnout this fall.

“Four years ago,” in the important 2014 off-year election, “we had the lowest turnout since World War II, 37 percent” and the GOP won big, he explained. “If we can go out and increase turnout of young people, people of color, and working people, by giving them hope, and get that up to 50 percent, virtually every single one of you will win your election,” he predicted.

Posted in Bernie Sanders, Democrats, Harry Reid, Politics. Tags: , , , , , , . No Comments »

Clinton And Her Apologists Still Wrong In Blaming James Comey For Clinton’s Loss

April 16, 2018 — Ron Chusid

There should be little controversy as to the main headline coming out of James Comey’s interview with George Stephanopoulos. Donald Trump is morally unfit to be president. The more questionable claims are coming from Clinton supporters who have used this as an opportunity to repeat the absurd claims that James Comey is responsible for Hillary Clinton losing the 2016 election. This is wrong on many levels.

The biggest problem with this is that James Comey would not have been investigating Clinton in the first place if she had not grossly violated the rules regarding the use of email, as was verified by the State Department Inspector General’s report, and  hadn’t handled classified information in a careless manner. The investigation further hurt Clinton as Comey’s report demonstrated that she had repeatedly lied in her public statements about the matter. This gave further credence to her reputation of both seeing herself above the  law and of being dishonest. She further hurt herself when she repeatedly lied about what James Comey had reported.

Hillary Clinton, not James Comey, is ultimately responsible for any problems caused by the email investigation. The Democratic Party also shares the blame after rigging the nomination for Clinton despite the evidence as to how weak a candidate would be (even beyond the ethical questions surrounding their behavior). This was like if the Republicans had nominated Richard Nixon after the public knew about Watergate.

It didn’t take much to see that a scandal of this magnitude could easily cost Clinton the election.This was obvious by March of 2015 when I had a post entitled, Clinton’s Use Of Private Email Suggests Democrats Need To Consider A Plan B For 2016. Instead of exercising common sense, or looking at the facts, many Democrats passed off lies about the scandal which were repeatedly being debunked by the major newspaper fact checkers. Instead of standing up for principle, many Democrats ignored the magnitude of Clinton’s unethical behavior with trite sayings like “but her email.”

The email scandal also highlighted Clinton’s long-standing weaknesses, including her dishonesty and acting like the rules which apply to everyone else do not apply to her. Clinton’s own serious negatives balanced out Trump’s negatives. Clinton’s personal views and record also hurt her, including her record on trade and on foreign interventionism.

The 2016 election was pretty close to a fifty-fifty election, with a close popular vote and an electoral college vote which could have gone either way. The problem for Clinton’s argument is that the race should never have been this close in an election against a candidate as terrible (and morally unfit) as Donald Trump. The polls showed that nominating Clinton, as opposed to another candidate such as Bernie Sanders, meant giving up about ten percent of the vote. That was a costly choice by Democrats.

David Axelrod responded to Clinton’s claims that Comey cost her the election last year:

“It takes a lot of work to lose to Donald Trump,” Axelrod told CNN on Wednesday. “Let me tell you, he was the least popular presidential candidate to win in the history of polling.”

…Axelrod called the 2016 race a “miserable slog” and said nobody in America wants to relive it “except the combatants who keep going back to it.”

“She has a legitimate beef because Comey’s letter was instrumental I think in her defeat, so in a narrow sense she is right about it,” Axelrod said.

“But Jim Comey didn’t tell her not to campaign in Wisconsin after the convention. Jim Comey didn’t say don’t put any resources into Michigan until the final week of the campaign,” he continued.

“And one of the things that hindered her in the campaign was a sense that she never fully was willing to take responsibility for her mistakes, particularly that server.”

Axelrod then offered a piece of advice for Clinton.

“If I were her, if I were advising her, I would say, ‘Don’t do this. Don’t go back and appear as if you’re shifting responsibility.’ … She said the words ‘I’m responsible,’ but the — everything else suggested that she doesn’t really feel that way,” he said.

“And I don’t think that helps her in the long run, so if I were her I would move on.”

Clinton was already in serious trouble, both due to her own personal faults and due to the terrible campaign she had run, in the final days of the election. The American Association for Public Opinion Research cast doubt on the effects of Comey’s letter in analyzing the late polls:

In its effort to explore reasons for the large percentage of late-deciding voters who chose Trump, the report examines a central Clinton claim: that FBI Director James Comey’s letter to Congress on Oct. 28 of last year, stating that the bureau had discovered additional evidence related to Clinton’s use of a private email server while serving as secretary of state, might have tipped the race.

The report does not find evidence the Comey letter was determinative.

“The evidence for a meaningful effect on the election from the FBI letter is mixed at best,” the report states, citing polls that showed Clinton’s support beginning to drop in the days leading up to the letter. “October 28th falls at roughly the midpoint (not the start) of the slide in Clinton’s support.”

Unfortunately there will continue to be Clinton apologists who will not face the fact that Clinton lost because of being a horrible candidate, who could not obtain a major party nomination for president in a fair campaign, and who went on to run a terrible campaign. Blaming others, whether it is James Comey, Russia, or any of the many others Clinton has tried to blame, does not change this.

Posted in Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Scandals. Tags: , , , , , , , . No Comments »

Politico On “How the Bernie Wing Won the Democratic Primaries”

March 31, 2018 — Ron Chusid

While there have been many negatives since the 2016 election, including both the presidency of Donald Trump and the Democratic establishment falling into McCarthyism and Cold War Revivalism, one good result was a weakening of the hold by the Clinton/DLC faction on the Democratic Party. A Clinton victory would have probably meant watching the Democrats pushing conservative candidates who would go down to defeat by even more conservative Republicans. Instead we are seeing a chance for more liberal and progressive candidates to run.

Politico has already declared the left to be the winners this year in an article entitled, How the Bernie Wing Won the Democratic Primaries. Here are some excerpts (quoting of which, as usual, does not indicate complete agreement):

In state after state, the left is proving to be the animating force in Democratic primaries, producing a surge of candidates who are forcefully driving the party toward a more liberal orientation on nearly every issue.

These candidates are running on an agenda that moves the party beyond its recent comfort zone and toward single-payer health care, stricter gun control, a $15 minimum wage, more expansive LGBT rights and greater protections for immigrants.

In the surest sign of the reoriented issue landscape, they’re joined by some of the most prominent prospects in the 2020 Democratic presidential field—Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand and Kamala Harris among them—who are embracing the same agenda.

According to data compiled by the Brookings Institution’s Primaries Project, the number of self-identified, nonincumbent progressive candidates in Texas spiked compared with the previous two election years. This year, there were nearly four times as many progressive candidates as in 2016. Meanwhile, the number of moderate and establishment candidates remained flat for the past three elections in Texas.

Even in Illinois, where the Democratic Party holds most of the levers of power, the data tell a similar story: There were more progressive candidates this year, the Primaries Project reports, than moderate and establishment candidates, by a count of 25 to 21…

The party’s ascendant left is coming after everybody, regardless of the outcome in Lipinski’s race. Progressive energy is pulsing through the primaries, most notably in the proliferation of Trump-backlash grass-roots groups like Indivisible, Justice Democrats and Brand New Congress that are teeming with activists inspired by Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign. There’s no comparable counterweight within the establishment…

These progressives aren’t necessarily sweeping races up and down the ballot. But they are winning enough of them—and generating enough grass-roots pressure—to continue driving the party leftward.

In Texas, a greater percentage of the progressive candidates either won or advanced to a runoff than the percentage of moderate and establishment candidates who did. In Illinois, the success rate between the wings was about equal. Five moderate or establishment candidates won their primaries, compared with three progressives.

Many on the left will question whether Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Kamala Harris truly embrace the same agenda, but as politicians they definitely see the need to at least give lip service to a more progressive agenda than Hillary Clinton did, despite her weak attempts to modify some of her conservative positions.

As is so often the case with articles which cite issues backed by more progressive candidates, I am also disappointed that nothing is said about Democrats opposing American interventionism and the neoconservative foreign policy which was promoted by their last presidential candidate. Nor was anything said about scaling back the surveillance state, restoring civil liberties lost as a consequence of the “war on terror,” or ending the drug war. It is as if the Democratic Party has stopped trying to dismantle the deleterious policies of George W. Bush.

If the victory is being called a victory by the “Bernie Wing,” in articles such as this, I hope that Bernie Sanders speaks out more on these issues. He has often taken the correct side, even if he has not stressed such issues. Sanders initially ran as an insurgent candidate to raise the economic issues which were more important to him, not expecting to win the 2016 nomination. Now that his wing has a chance of taking over the party, and winning elections at all levels, I hope that he does devote more time to these issues.

Posted in Bernie Sanders, Democrats, Donald Trump, George Bush, Hillary Clinton. Tags: , , , , , , , , , , . No Comments »

Clinton Reminds The World Why She Really Lost–And It Has Nothing To Do With Russia

March 14, 2018 — Ron Chusid


Most losing candidates keep a low profile after losing an election. Despite being robbed of victory, Al Gore kept quiet at first, and reemerged more liberal, and a vocal opponent of the Iraq war. Hillary Clinton in contrast has been spending the time since her election making excuses, and her popularity has fallen even further since the election. Her recent statement in India are even angering many Democrats who have supported her. The Hill reports:

Democrats are angry that Hillary Clinton continues to discuss what went wrong during the 2016 presidential election against President Trump.

Even some of Clinton’s own former aides and surrogates say the former Democratic presidential nominee should back away from the discussion about her failed campaign because it’s harmful to the party.

During a conference in India this weekend, Clinton called states that supported her in the election more economically advanced than the states that backed Trump.

The remarks reminded many of the former secretary of State’s comments in 2016 that some of Trump’s supporters fit in a “basket of deplorables,” a line the Republican then used against her repeatedly during the final stretch of the campaign.

She also insinuated that women who voted for Trump were motivated by “ongoing pressure to vote the way that your husband, your boss, your son, whoever, believes you should.”

In interviews with The Hill on Tuesday, even the staunchest Clinton allies as well as longtime advisers say the comments were cringeworthy and ultimately detrimental to Democrats.

“She put herself in a position where [Democrats] from states that Trump won will have to distance themselves from her even more,” said one former senior Clinton aide. “That’s a lot of states.”

Another Clinton surrogate questioned the decisionmaking behind Clinton’s remarks. For months, some Democrats have been arguing that Clinton’s sentiments have been counterproductive to the party’s rebuilding efforts. And some have told her she should emulate former President Obama’s model to only make statements when it’s essential.

Even before she launched her book tour last fall for “What Happened,” party strategists have said Clinton should lay low.

“She’s annoying me. She’s annoying everyone, as far as I can tell,” said one 2016 Clinton surrogate. “Who lets her say these things?”

The Washington Post added:

Like Trump, Clinton has lost popularity since the 2016 election in national polls.

In early December, Gallup found 36 percent of Americans viewed her favorably, the same percentage that approved of Trump’s presidential performance. The result marked a record low for Clinton in the Gallup poll, which has tracked her favorability since 1993. Just 5 percent of Republicans and 27 percent of independents had a favorable view of her.

Several studies of the 2016 election have found that Trump overperformed Clinton in economically struggling parts of the nation, a likely motivator for voters seeking change in the party control of the White House. Parts of the country that shifted their support from Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016 were also more likely to be negatively affected by globalization.

Another post-election study showed that Clinton’s hawkish views were also harmful to her campaign.

As was revealed in Shattered, Hillary Clinton decided upon the strategy of blaming others such as Russia for her loss within twenty-four hours of losing. The Congressional testimony showed that Russian activities on social media were trivial compared to the actions of the two major party campaigns. While we have known for some time that the Clinton campaign had used paid internet trolls, new information came out today in an article at Huffington Post regarding the use of fake accounts used by Clinton supporters to oppose Bernie Sanders.

While Democrats express frustration with Clinton continuing to blame others for her loss, many Democrats do continue to support her unfounded claims. For example, after the House Intelligence Committee reported that there was no collusion between Russia and Donald Trump to alter the election, Democrats have continued to make arguments which are not supported by the facts. While it is true that House Republicans very likely would have denied the presence of collusion if it existed, and it is possible that Robert Mueller might uncover new information in the future, the fact remains that the evidence available at present shows no such evidence of collusion.

Despite the lack of evidence of meaningful cooperation between the Trump  campaign and Russia to effect the election result, Democrats such as Joaquin Castro have been giving interviews distorting the facts following the committee report. In this interview on NPR’s Morning Edition, Castro both made unfounded claims and moved the goal post a tremendous distance to promote actions which do not show any meaningful collusion as if they were evidence of collusion. While not in the transcript on the web site, during the actual broadcast host David Greene debunked Castro’s claims after the interview. Democrats who continue to make unfounded claims look like Republicans who continued to justify the Iraq war long after it was clear to most that we were never threatened by WMD from Iraq.

If Democrats are going to move forward from the 2016 election, they need to do more than just cringe when Clinton makes asinine statements. They need to acknowledge that Clinton lost because of her own mistakes, both during the campaign and in making bad decisions throughout her career. They must admit that they were wrong to rig the nomination for her, and reform the nominating process. Finally they must repudiate both the corrupt personal behavior of the Clintons in using their  public positions to unethically enrich themselves, and the conservative positions she has promoted throughout her career.

Posted in Al Gore, Bernie Sanders, Bill Clinton, Blogs & Social Media, Democrats, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton. Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , . 2 Comments »

DNC Talking About Reforming Failed System Which Gave Hillary Clinton 2016 Nomination With No Action Yet

March 12, 2018 — Ron Chusid

The nomination processes of both major political parties failed in 2016, with each major political party nominating a candidate who was unfit to be president. The situation was even more outrageous in the Democratic Party which  has long standing rules to supposedly prevent the nomination of an unelectable candidate. Instead of utilizing the rules to prevent an unelectable candidate from winning, the DNC used such rules, and made additional rules changes for the 2016 election, to give the nomination to Hillary Clinton in a process which was no more democratic than to give the nomination in the proverbial smoke-filled room.

The Democrats ultimately lost an election they should have won in 2016 due to rigging the nomination for a candidate too weak to win the nomination on her own, and who was unable to beat a candidate as terrible as Donald Trump in 2016. The rigging of the Democratic nomination also alienated many potential voters, putting the party in danger of further losses. As I noted in December, the party created a “unity commission” to make recommendations to change some of the party rules which led to the catastrophe in 2016. Typically establishment Democrats call for unity, except when they are attacking the left.

A key recommendation was to reduce the number of superdelegates. While this recommendation was hardly sufficient following the abuses of 2016, the party leaders continue to talk without actually taking any action. The Hill reports on their inaction over the past weekend:

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) voted Saturday to acknowledge a need to reduce the influence of so-called “superdelegates” in the presidential primaries, while a decision on specific changes to the role such delegates will play in the 2020 election won’t come until this summer.

At the DNC’s winter meeting, officials accepted language committing the party to reduce the “perceived influence” of superdelegates, the unelected delegates that are free to support any candidate for the party’s nomination…

The DNC said in the report adopted Saturday that its Rules and Bylaws Committee will present its final proposal to the full party later this year. The panel was given six months, starting in late December, to come up with specific actions it would take regarding superdelegates.

DNC Chair Tom Perez called the vote Saturday a “milestone.”

“[T]he Democratic Party is stating loudly and clearly that the status quo will change,” he said. “When our work is complete, our 2020 nomination process will be the most fair and transparent in the history of American presidential politics.”

Perez had told The Associated Press that officials “will improve the democratic process” before the 2020 elections. “If we’re going to win elections, you’ve got to earn the trust of voters, and many voters had a crisis of confidence in the Democratic Party.”

The DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee had been discussing a proposal drafted by the Unity Reform Commission that was created after the 2016 primary battle. The commission had said they wanted the number of superdelegates reduced by 60 percent, but the Rules and Bylaws Committee suggested it might do even more.

During the 2016 election, supporters of Sanders argued that superdelegates allowed Clinton to get early endorsements and develop an early lead before the primaries or caucuses even began.

There are DNC members who want to remove superdelegates from the Democratic Convention’s first ballot altogether, allowing the candidate with the majority of pledged delegates earned through the primaries and caucuses to win the nomination.

Other DNC members believe they have earned their uncommitted vote through years of participation in the party.

Any proposal to change the power of superdelegates would need two-thirds support from the DNC’s 447 members to pass.

Hillary Clinton’s strategy was to promote the view that her nomination was inevitable, and the party’s rules played into this. This included restricting debates so that opposing candidates would receive far less coverage and have less of an opportunity to build early momentum, along with superdelegates and front loading of southern states. While in 2008 the popular vote in Iowa was released, this was not done in 2016, harming Sanders who probably won the popular vote but did not receive a proportionate number of delegates due to having his voters more heavily concentrated in college towns. Failing to announce the popular vote can also harm candidates who might receive a significant number of votes but fail to receive delegates.

These rules played into Clinton’s strategy of appearing inevitable by having the news media reporting a strong lead for Clinton in delegates after the votes in New Hampshire and Iowa, despite Sanders receiving more votes. Then there were the shenanigans by Harry Reid in Nevada, followed by favorable states for Clinton on Super Tuesday. The party also helped in other ways including changing of fund raising rules to help Clinton, voting restrictions, and giving Clinton unprecedented control over the party during the primary campaign.

The recommendations of the Unity Commission do not go far enough. Besides eliminating superdelegates, if the Democrats hope to gain the trust of voters, they should also end the front-loading of primaries, end restrictions on debates, and give assurances that the types of changes made in 2016 to give Clinton the nomination will not happen again.

Besides these more technical issues, the credibility of the Democratic Party was also seriously harmed by nominating a candidate as corrupt as Hillary Clinton, who repeatedly used her years in public life for personal financial gain, and whose support for unnecessary wars and military intervention has resulted in a massive number of deaths and misery. More recently the DNC has purged progressives and made lobbyists superdelegates. Other arms of the Democratic Party have pushed conservative policies and attacked progressive candidates despite evidence contradicting the view of the Democratic leadership that progressive candidates are less electable. Just talking about reducing the “perceived influence” of superdelegates is not enough.

Posted in Bernie Sanders, Democrats, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Politics, Scandals. Tags: , , , , , . No Comments »

Democratic Pundit Disputes Myth That Progressives Are Less Electable Than More Conservative Democrats

March 10, 2018 — Ron Chusid

Democrats suffered serious losses in Congressional and state races in 2010 and 2014 after running as a Republican-lite party. Despite trying to shift the blame to Russia and others, Democrats lost the 2016 election to a candidate as terrible as Donald Trump by nominating a corrupt conservative warmonger who has spent her career undermining liberal values. Finally we are seeing people question the conventional wisdom that nominating more conservative candidates will increase the chances for Democrats to win. I looked at this issue yesterday, and found that Bud Budowsky, a Democratic columnist at The Hill, has written a column on the same topic.

Budowsky wrote that A Sanders-Warren ticket could win big in 2020. Besides this ticket, Budowsky discussed two other hypothetical Democratic tickets, Joe Biden-Amy Klobuchar and Joe Kennedy III with either California Attorney General Xavier Becerra or Senator Kamala Harris. He wrote the following in favor of a more progressive ticket:

Behind the scenes of the national Democratic Party, it is commonly accepted wisdom, though not proven by facts, that the most progressive candidates are not the most electable candidates. In some states and districts this might be true.

But, in terms of winning the national popular vote and an electoral vote majority, there is a credible case that the most clearly progressive and politically aggressive Democrats can indeed win, and potentially win big.

The most important and powerfully persuasive data in modern American politics is that virtually every poll in 2016 showed Sanders defeating Donald Trump by 10 percent or more. In the Real Clear Politics summary of 2016 polling, Sanders ran ahead of Trump by an average margin of more than 10 percent and often by much larger margins.

Whether one supports Sanders or any other potential candidate in 2020, the case is clear that a strong progressive program and message would give Democrats a decided advantage in any campaign against the scandal-ridden and crony-capitalist-dominated presidency of Trump and his GOP allies in Congress…

While I could support Sanders, Warren or any of the progressive Democratic change candidates who could run on the ticket in 2020, it is important to disabuse the false notion, which is contrary to the facts demonstrated by national polling throughout 2016 and beyond, that progressive candidates are less electable.

Americans want a clear message of progressive change and would enthusiastically support a Sanders-Warren ticket, or any other ticket running on a similar program in 2020.

I agree with nominating candidates who have a clear message and stand for change. My one nitpick is that I would not limit this to progressive economic ideas. While Bernie Sanders did concentrate on this message in 2016, there were other factors which led many to support him over Hillary Clinton. It was partially over character, but there were other issues too. One study argues that Clinton lost because of being a warmonger. While I question if this was the main factor, foreign policy is important. Democrats attracted new voters when they opposed neoconservatives while George Bush was in office. They lost votes when they nominated a neocon interventionist such as Hillary Clinton, whose policies have caused considerable death and suffering around the world.

Sanders’ views on social and cultural issues were also far more attractive to voters than than Clinton’s socially conservative views. Many voters, especially young voters, are more socially libertarian. Democrats might be preferable to Republicans on reproductive rights, but fail to consistently support policies to reduce the role of government in the private lives of individuals. In addition to Clinton’s support for military interventionism, and the toleration of this by establishment Democrats, there is their support for the drug war. Clinton did not change her views on same-sex marriage until it became politically inexpedient to continue to oppose it. While it is still a government program, support for single payer healthcare, which Clinton campaigned against and the DCCC continues to oppose, is far more acceptable than government mandates pushed by Clinton to purchase private insurance plans with outrageous deductibles.

It is a good sign that more Democrats are paying attention to Bernie Sanders’ criticism of corporate Democrats, along with his support for Medicare-for-All.  If Democrats are to rebuild a winning majority, they should more consistently challenge establishment views in other areas too.

Posted in Bernie Sanders, Democrats, Donald Trump, Drug Policy, Elizabeth Warren, Foreign Policy & National Security, Health Care, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden. Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , . No Comments »

Matthew Yglesias Shows That Republican-Lite Democrats Are Not More Likely To Win

March 9, 2018 — Ron Chusid

The conflict between the DCCC and the progressive wing of the Democratic Party seen in a Texas primary this week was just one instance of them supporting conservative over progressive Democrats. Democrats tried to run as a Republican-lite party in 2010 and 2014 and did poorly. They nominated the most anti-liberal pro-status quo candidate possible in Hillary Clinton for the presidency in 2016 and lost to a candidate as terrible as Donald Trump. On the other hand, non-establishment candidates have been doing better than many expected.

Matthew Yglesias, who is generally supportive of the Democratic establishment, has noted that the party’s view that more conservative Democrats are the key to victory has not been valid. He provided some examples, and then discussed studies regarding this at Vox in an article entitled,  The DCCC should chill out and do less to try to pick Democrats’ nominees–There’s very little evidence that “electable” moderates do better.

The real truth, however, is that politics is hard to predict. Extensive empirical research shows that it matters less than you might think whether a party goes with an “electable” moderate.

This suggests primary voters should probably be inclined to vote for candidates who they think will be smart, hard-working advocates for causes they believe in rather than focusing too much on “electability” concerns.

It’s natural, in particular, for a national party committee whose work heavily features fundraising to be strongly biased toward candidates who are good at fundraising. But there’s very little evidence that this is genuinely the key to political success (Donald Trump, for example, was a terrible fundraiser in 2016), and overemphasis on donor-friendly candidates ends up putting a thumb on the ideological scale in an unseemly way.

Some other things to consider are that the old linear left/right political spectrum no longer applies. Last year a change candidate was desired, and Bernie Sanders polled much better than Hillary Clinton in head to head tests against Republicans. There were a substantial number of Republicans as well as independents who would vote for Sanders, but not for Clinton. When the Democrats made the mistake of nominating Clinton, the remaining anti-establishment change candidate won (even if he advocated the wrong kind of change).

Voters also prefer candidates who stand for something, while the types of Republican-lite Democrats who fail to stand for anything come across as fakes more interested in their own gain. Many Republican voters were willing to switch from traditional Republican views to those of Trump, suggesting that they were not really ideological conservatives while voting Republican. A large share of Sanders voters did not support him due to being far left on the traditional spectrum, but because they wanted a change from the corruption of the status quo. In contrast, the efforts of establishment Democrats to move to move the party of to the right has been a failure in election after election.

(more…)

Posted in Bernie Sanders, Democrats, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton. Tags: , , , , , . No Comments »

Attack on Progressive Candidate Backfires Against DCCC

March 7, 2018 — Ron Chusid

Liberals and progressives have two major opponents in American politics–the Republican Party and the Democratic Party establishment. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), which, as I noted last week, is forefront in the effort by Democrats to avoid taking a stand on the issues, also raised concern on the left for its attacks on a progressive candidate in Texas’s  7th Congressional District. Their attacks against Laura Moser appear to have backfired. Vox reports:

Until a few weeks ago, Laura Moser was a little-known name, one of seven candidates running for the Democratic primary in Texas’s Seventh Congressional District.

That was, until the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee unleashed a scorched-earth campaign against the former freelance journalist and progressive activist, releasing an opposition memo highlighting past statements Moser made seemingly denigrating her home state.

The move may have helped propel Moser across the finish line in the first round of the primary and into a May runoff election, along with Houston attorney Lizzie Pannill Fletcher, who was endorsed by the pro-female candidate Super PAC Emily’s List.

By trying to finish off Moser early, the DCCC ended up elevating her national profile and opened up an intraparty rift in the process, galvanizing progressive groups that came out supporting her.

The Intercept, along with Vox, pointed out  that, “Voter-turnout expert Ben Tribbett argued that the DCCC pushed Moser over the top.” More on the race at The Nation:

Moser was one of the two top finishers in the initial primary, beating out several other serious, and well-funded, contenders. A May runoff will feature Moser, a tech-savvy activist who popularized the Daily Action text-messaging tool that became a favorite with resistance campaigners against Trump and Trumpism, and corporate lawyer Lizzie Fletcher, who ran with the backing of Emily’s List and a number of wealthy donors. Moser won 24 percent of Tuesday’s primary vote to 29 percent for Fletcher. The next closest contender, progressive physician Jason Westin, won 19 percent.

There’s a good case to be made that the DCCC helped Moser, whose grassroots fund-raising spiked after the attack. She also earned a late-in-the-race endorsement from Our Revolution, the group formed by Bernie Sanders backers that had established a strong presence in Texas—and when the results came in, Texas populist Jim Hightower, an Our Revolution Board member, said: “The voters of Texas showed they are the only deciders in the race to represent them in Congress.”

Posted in Bernie Sanders, Congress, Democrats, Politics. Tags: , , , , . No Comments »
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